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Most commentary on Europe's troubles has focused on the PIIGS nations (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain). But the meltdown that's followed the financial crisis of 2008-9 is having even more severe political and economic effects in much of the European Union's expansion zone, in the formerly Communist east.

This was strikingly illustrated in a table in Saturday's New York Times showing the falloff in new car registrations between pre-crisis 2007 and 2011. At the bottom of 24 European nations shown were Hungary, with a dropoff of 73.7%, and Romania, at -74.1%. (Latvia was just short of that, and Bulgaria was off 53.4%.) The EU as a whole was off 15.8%.

Not everyone needs a car, but that's a good proxy for suffering of the would-be middle class. And what do we see as a result?

In Hungary, a rightist nationalist, Viktor Orban, is moving toward sweeping powers including domination of the central bank as a response. The country risks not only penalties from international bodies but isolation from the world it was allowed to re-embrace after 1990.

In Romania, throngs marched in Bucharest on Thursday demanding the ouster of an austerity government. Their pain's source is not merely domestic. There as elsewhere in the old Soviet satellite countries--it gets worse still in places like Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus--an outlet for strivers has been nearly shut off: The jobs in established Europe that were available to immigrants who would repatriate funds back home have dried up or been retaken by domestic labor. So the Romanians are left to stew in recession-cum-depression.

(For reference, the GDP of Hungary and Romania combined is about equal to that of Greece.)

A general global pickup in economic activity can slowly heal these afflictions, so long as the aggrieved nations do not revert to authoritarianism, nationalization or violence that scares off future investment. Some of the hard-hit nations, such as Estonia, are sticking to liberal economic policies and (other things being equal) they should recover first. But the peeling away of others from what appeared, only a few years ago, to be halcyon days for a pan-European market is probably inevitable.

That will be tragic for many, especially the industrious within the "lost" countries. Policymakers, especially at the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, should not lose sight of what opportunities still exist for holding on to the expansion bloc and its demonstrably ambitious people. Too much attention is being focused on cases like Greece because of the concentrated holding of its debt among major financial houses. I would put the West's chips on a Romania instead.

UPDATE 2/6: Romania's prime minister and his government resigned under fire today.